Re: Fwd: Re: [9fans] samuel (fwd)

[Bengt Kleberg <eleberg@cbe.ericsson.se>]

> what terrible languages are you envisioning that would be so
> difficult for humans to read as to _require_ the use of external
> help?  the language
> 
> 	#!/bin/rc
> 	cat $* | tr '^@' '()' | lisp
> 
> would benefit from ^-@ matching, but aside from contrived examples
> i can't understand what more you want your text editor to do.

I would like for the text editor to tell me (with a single click) where
the start/end of a construction (be it function/if/while/...) is, if i
am at the end/start. sort of balancing the parantheses(sp?).
this is only neccessary if the language is not always visually balanced, like
a few languages are (ex: python).


> The various ML dialects share the same flaw in their syntax.
> They lack a simple property I call editor friendliness.  An editor
> friendly language has the property that a simple calculation
> is all that is needed to locate the beginning of an expression when
> one is at the end of an expression.
> 
> As you can guess, Lisp is a very editor friendly language.  
> Because of this fact, an experienced Emacs user realizes
> nearly all of the benefits of structure based editing without
> suffering from its restrictions.
> 	- John D. Ramsdell
> 
> The various Lisp dialects share the same flaw in their syntax.
> They lack a simple property I call human friendliness.  A human
> friendly language has the property that syntactic constructs are
> different enough from one another that a simple visual inspection
> is all that is needed to locate the beginning of an expression when
> one is at the end of an expression.
> 
> As you can guess, Lisp is a very human unfriendly language.
> Because of this fact, an experienced Lisp user realizes that it
> is virtually impossible to write Lisp programs of any size without
> substantial mechanical assistance.
> 	- Andrew Koenig
> 

if the 'human friendly language' allows free formatting of 'syntactic
constructs' it will be _very_ difficult for 'a simple visual
inspection' to _always_ 'locate the beginning of an expression when one
is at the end of an expression'. IMHO.

(btw, i normally write lisp programs with the expectation of having
'substantial mechanical assistance' in saveing/running them. it is
therefore prefectly ok, i think, to assume the presence of such
assistance.)


bengt